Café Mouffe: Tarace Boulba

No, this isn’t the Rebirth Brass Band. It isn’t New Orleans, either, , but it could be. You can go ahead and second-line. Don’t sit down.

This brass band is  Tarace Boulba from Paris. Their 2006 and 2008 concert clips prove that neither side of the pond has a monopoly when it comes to funk. According to Global Hit’s Marco Werman:

Tarace Boulba. Sounds like a sweet Turkish dessert. It’s actually one funky brass band from France. Technically, they consider themselves a “fanfare,” spelled like fanfare, but in French it means a brass ensemble. Tarace Boulba sounds like Balkan wedding music…if it were played by African and African-American funk musicians. The group was founded in the outskirts of Paris in 1993. It has 800 members, most of them non-professional, all of them very committed. So committed, they’re unpaid. They actually pay…a membership fee of 15 euros (or 20 bucks), and they’re in the band, for life.

Encore: Some members of the Tarace Boulba collective compled their first North American tour last week, tracing the roots of funk from New Orleans to Minneapolis, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York. They closed at Rubulad in Brooklyn on May 30.

Café Mouffe opens on Fridays. Please drop by for a listen and a chat. Sometimes the embedded videos don’t work here due to bandwidth constraints, but you’ll always find links to video sources in the notes. Try them. If you’re curious about the Mouffe, here’s the original idea behind it’s creation.